Really now. Something new. The only Politician to have lied Rob Ford? What Politician doesn't lie? LOL.
Yes. Ford lied more about more things than the typical politician. A lot more. To be fair, in some cases he was simply unaware of (and indifferent to) whether what he has said was true our not. His reality was orthogonal to truth, so saying "he lied" was what I call a misnomer.
I've recently ridden the SRT*. It seems to be made entirely out of depression, and I strongly suspect it is powered by dead puppies and the tears of orphans. Riding it would depress God. It isn't about the crappy transfer at Kennedy (I can see why Miller thought that getting rid of that would have made it tolerable, but I think he over looked the depressing part). It isn't even about the trapped-in-the-70s-but-envisioning-the-future style cars (I don't know when the SRT was built, but it feels like whoever designed the rolling stock binge watched Logan's Run over and over). It isn't that they are too narrow and too cramped for such a long haul. There is something just terribly soul sucking about them, in a way that even, for instance, the deader-than-dead Sheppard subway isn't.
Other than reminding riders to each chocolate at each station, I don't see a way to convince a relatively small, but important, portion of the electorate to, well, settle for anything other than an extension of line 2. We can argue numbers and efficiency all day long, but I think it utterly missing the point. The current thing sucks. As in, the soul from ones body, the spring from ones step, and the joy from ones life. When confronting something like that, the side arguing "but it costs too much!!!" are sadly, missing the point. One cannot argue against that soul-crushing monstrosity with arguments about money. It's really that bad.
That group isn't going to be swayed by promises of an LRT (I can't help but think they think "OH! This new untested technology will TOTALLY be different", and I can't blame them). It's going to have to be a subway. While I dispute that Scarborough doesn't get its share of funding, this is truly a matter of paying for the sins of the morons who built that rumbling carriage ride through Hell** in the first place.
That said, it is unlikely that this is going to revitalize Scarborough and make it a huge successful new downtown, which sucks, because that's the best way to recoup the spending.
Given that, the second best is to try desperately to make (I assume) STC a transit hub cum quasi-downtown. The density will probably be there in 50 years or so. It might be able to catch up to Yorkdale's current status its 20 or so.
My question, as someone who doesn't have to ride that every day, is, isn't it a long trek from STC to downtown even without the SRT and the transfer? If so, it seems like something like a smart track that worked and could be built would be needed (which is fine - we'd have contra-flow traffic to STC from anyone the west of it). The problem I see there is that all the tracks will be used to transport people from further out into downtown (giving those in Scarborough the chance to simultaneously not be able to get on a train while also being referred to as "transit haves"), and Metrolinx will almost certainly charge, well, a lot.
Also, while I believe at this point we don't have a choice but to extend line 2 out to STC, regardless of the cost, it will suck out most of the money for other extensions, and it will mean the DRL is needed soonest (not for relief of us happy Transit Haves, but so that the folks from Scarborough don't skip the soul crushing SRT only to wind up at a body-crushing Yonge/Bloor). Also, we'll have to move a lot of people to STC and the other stops to get them onto the subway. That's going to be tough (I think Scarborough has the same problem with over crowded buses that, say, Dufferin, Don Mills and Eglinton have).
Rambling aside, my questions are, assuming that the extension is non-negotiable: how can STC be maximized as a city centre; how can people be moved more efficiently (from their point of view, I mean); and how can STC be maximized as a Union Station East?
Because we can debate numbers up and down, but if it's not about numbers, there is a good percentage of the city (a few percent, anyway) for whom this is not negotiable.
* I'm one of those "transit haves", squeezing oneself onto a subway after all those transit "have nots" have filled it up.
** That's not to say Scarborough is Hell. Just the bit immediately around the SRT. Like, 3 metres around it.